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wiredmikey writes "Botnets controlled by criminal enterprises all over the world continue to multiply at a steep rate, and it is now arguably the smaller, harder-to-trace operations that organizations should be the most worried about. Not only are smaller botnets cheaper and easier to build out and operate, but criminals have already realized that large-scale botnet activity attracts unwanted attention, and not just of law enforcement."

Um - detectable depending on what they want to access. I've deployed a daily login attempt/file access logarithm that will alert me to any intrusion attempt - it doesn't really matter to me how many other servers the intruder attempts to intrude; in fact, I don't even look.

The word you're looking for is "algorithm". A "logarithm" is a number that you get by taking the exponent of a number from a certain base. For example the "common" (base 10) logarithm of 1000 is 3. What your machine is doing has nothing to do with this.

Um - detectable depending on what they want to access. I've deployed a daily login attempt/file access logarithm that will alert me to any intrusion attempt

What exactly do you consider an "intrusion attempt"? A failed SSH login? A suspicious script running on a website one of your users loaded? A phishing/trojan e-mail? An alert from the anti-virus (if you're running Windows)? How on earth do you browse through all those alerts, most of which can be ignored? Also, if you're working in IT, then you do care if they get into something. Obviously you would prefer it not be something like your main file server or something that stores sensitive financial/FERPA/HIPA

The whole point of a cronjob log-combing program is to detect multiple failed login attempts across ~any~ protocol (I have open). When I do find a failed attempt, I do note it, but it is onlythe ~repeated~ attempts that I track down.

"The ability of defenders to thwart these attacks by over-provisioning their networks does not increase proportionally with the disruptive power of botnet-driven DDoS attacks, which will grow as more Internet users come online in developing nations and fast broadband connections become available more cheaply to home users that are less educated in proper security behavior."

It seems that by now, people should be MORE educated about security and not less...but oh well.

As an ISP, we actively track and warn customers that are infected. It was a bit of a hurdle at first but merely making our customers aware of the possibility has drastically decreased the number of infections despite the steady increase in number of customers.

Yes, but the larger the botnet it becomes more of a target for takedown. Running smaller botnets under the radar for a longer period of time can be more effective with less of a chance of being caught.

Sorry, I wasn't imagining myself as the 'bot-sender' ; ) For the time being, I'm alerted to any multiple failed connection attempt (no matter what protocol, even http) -...should I give the results of my foresighted vigilance to the antivirus/trojan/fear company (none to whom I subscribe) that I pay every month (that I do not)?

The most effective anti-intrusion application I have seen out there is Cloudmark... never mind the MS platform. They've got the right idea, their idea can work for even for trojan/vi

I know for a fact that Linux boxes, especially servers on the net, get compromised and used by criminals from unknown locations on the planet. But botnets are made almost entirely of PCs running Microsoft Windows. Whether it is the OS or the apps running on it or both are the ultimate cause, it all has MS Windows in common.

All this botnet crap going on all over the planet could be halted in very short order if Microsoft would "man up" and do something about it. With every new release of an OS, it makes a choice and every time it has chosen to maintain the old ways instead of fixing the problems. Perhaps my perspective on this is a little wrong. I have not yet, for example, seen a compromised Windows 7 machine. (That's not because they can't be, it's simply because I haven't seen one yet and a lot of people don't want to use Windows 7.)

If I was in control of a beef company and the bovine products I was distributing was tied to global illness and crap like that, there would be no end to the complaints and measures taken against me. But somehow, the world hasn't managed to point enough fingers at Microsoft demanding that they do something about the problem. The only finger pointers are pretty much the IT crowd and no one listens to us. It is fascinating to me because the problems with compromised Windows machines has massive economic effect which, as we all know, is far more important than global health and general public safety.

It's not about Microsoft having to "man up"... it's more about a structural flaw in the basic paradigm we all know and love... the idea of running everything a default permissive environment.
Until capability based security is put into common use, this problem will NEVER go away.

Agreed. Microsoft needs to essentially dump the Windows API. For obvious reasons, they don't want to just dump it. But this sort of move would not be unprecedented. Apple did it when it came out with Mac OS X. Sure they wrote a "Classic" support layer and it was buggy as hell. People complained to hell and back about it. But in the end, that only served to fuel the migration from "classic" apps to OSX apps. If Microsoft were to do that, we would see a much more energetic migration from Windows XP to

Who is to say it wouldn't run Windows apps - what's wrong with including some kind of virtual machine running a previous version for backwards compatability? I can already run Windows apps on Mac/Linux using this method, I'm sure MS could include a free license. They could even make it a business opportunity if they made it a limited time functionality to ease the transition (i.e. we'll support this for X years, then you have to buy new apps or your own old Windows license).

it's more about a structural flaw in the basic paradigm we all know and love... the idea of running everything a default permissive environment

Even that's largely irrelevant. Back when I had a botnet or two of my own, I didn't really give a damn what kind of permissions they had as long as they were capable of accessing the net. Firewalls set up to stop programs from dialing out didn't seem to be much of an issue - the average user would just click "allow", anyway. The biggest problem has always been - and will continue to be - ignorant or uncaring users.

The vast majority of current exploits are targeted at applications, rather than OSs; primarily Acrobat Reader and Java at the moment.

Regardless, no OS can overcome the problem of permitting users to carry out administrative tasks without allowing them to execute malicious code when they really, really want to see the dancing bunnies.

Organizations shouldn't be worried about small botnets simply because they haven't attracted the attention of law enforcement -- they should be afraid because their antivirus won't have a signature for the malware being propogated by small botnets. And what's the point of advising organizations to be worried about small botnets? Fear doesn't increase security.

Consultants call this fear "awareness". And if you want a general group to implement any measures, you have to "create awareness". It's a well-known fact.So, because of the awareness, security measures are taken.

Not only the cyber security, but also physical security (security companies and weapons industry) thrive because of the awareness of all kinds of problems (security leaks, terrorism, etc).The real question is: is the threat as big as it is portrayed?

For some of the botnet activities, size matters. If want to steal cc numbers or passwords, being in more places mean more chances to get something useful. Other common use of botnets is sending spam, where more machines=better (harder to block because the numbers, and less chances to fill the bandwidth of those computers, and be noticed because that, if want to send a lot of spam).

Instead of just going small, there are 2 tactics that could be used by botnets: try being more stealth (i.e. sending out information only when the user does), or resizing by quality of the machines they run on (i.e. stay active only in machines where actually they are putting credit card info, or their spam is not being bounced, or having better bandwidth)

The problem with this is that botnets have to come from ~somewhere~ - and that somewhere can be detected. It's what they're trying to ~do~ - and how often - that is important. I suppose the whole point of the article is that bots are becoming less 'intensive' - we have to spread our intrusion dectection defenses to detect attempts spread over a longer period of time, that's all.

If every house in a neighborhood has a small ant colony, they are all more likely to go unnoticed than if one or several houses has a large and obvious colony. Likewise, if only half the houses in the town have small colonies, they're more likely to be OK than if all houses had an infestation.

There are quite a few ways to be 'stealthy'. Some would be method/mode and 'intelligence' to infection of hosts. (Eg. semi-random, selective within subnets, distribut

I had a heated debate once with a colleague, about how botnets operate, and he was under the impression they were all script kiddies with no morals, and just wanted to thrash all websites and infect everyone.... I tired to let him know, they were people (higher ups) with organization skills of real companies, with real business sense, using techniques to covertly avoid detection. I even heard of one botnet that would send out a few emails from each computer a minute, not more....to avoid sending up flags th

If the botnet is for churning out large volumes of spam then a large, distributed net is better. Traffic will be lower at any one node for the same total volume. If the botnet is to be used for targeting specific installations or types of installations (ala Stuxnet) then smaller is better. The more infected nodes you operate, the greater the likelihood of detection.

How do we know the criminals haven't just gone bigger scale? Why settle for a giant botnet when you can run a botnet full of tiny botnets? Is the attention attracted from seeing the same code on thousands of machines, or from seeing the same attack from thousands of machines? Why run DDoS attacks when you can run multiple exploit attacks instead on multiple networks to throw off any sign of a large coordinated attack?

Instructions for Linux, but can be modified to suit *BSD, some other OSes. Remember, with firewalls fascism is good.

1. install and configure denyhosts http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] 2. use the reporting/updating feature of denyhosts to coordinate and sync botnet-dropping with other denyhosts users3. write a script or daemon that checks for updates to denyhost's hosts-restricted file and then tells your iptables firewall to drop all packets to and from those hosts

Does anyone know where the download is for Denyhosts v2.7? This is listed in the changelog for Deny Hosts, but SourceForge only has v2.6 available for download, which I believe still has a minor log injection DoS exploit.

Couldn't it be possible to have a botnet upgrade into different versions, allowing it to split?

Clarification:Virus writer releases virus A and sets up control server A.Botnet A gets large, and the writer is worried about authorities, so he sets up servers B and C, as well as writing two updates.Botnet A gets update B or update C from control server A.The update installs the new virus and removes the old one.Botnet B gets large, virus writter sets up servers D and F.Process continues.